RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jewishlinknj.com/features/25956-what-did-they-know-when-did-they-know-how-did-they-interpret-the-information-2

Part II

Initial Reaction of American Jews to the Beginning of the War in Europe

American Jewish leaders were not surprised that the war would produce immense suffering for their European brethren. The initial reports deeply concerned them about the precarious position of the Jews in Eastern and Central Europe. Even before the war began, Hayim Greenberg, head of Poalei Zion and editor of the Labor Zionist Jewish Frontier, warned on June 15, 1939, that Jews “will be the first to suffer,” and that the conflict “might envelope the entire world.”

On September 13, 1939, Jacob Lestchinsky, the noted historian, sociologist and authority on Jewish demography and economic history, advised American Jews “to be prepared for events whose frightfulness will eclipse” the pogroms and massacres of the last war. “Human imagination,” he said, “is simply too limited to grasp the probable magnitude of the war’s toll or how much Jewish blood will be shed.” He feared the Jews of Ukraine, Galicia and Romania were in grave danger.

Writing in B’nai B’rith’s The National Call in October, 1939, Albert Viton, a journalist who reported from Palestine before joining the US Department of Agriculture in early 1940, observed that “everywhere Jews are the chief sufferers…and that there is no limit to their possible misery….” He believed that “a terribly large portion of Jews in Central, Eastern and Northern Europe will not survive the war; possibly as many as half of them will perish before the end.”

In the September-October 1939 issue of the Contemporary Jewish Record, published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Committee expressed uncertainty as to what awaited the Jews in the future. “It is as yet too early today to comprehend the full extent of the tragedy which has overtaken the world… but [it] is sufficiently great to defy the imagination and stir the deep sympathy of those who still believe in mercy, justice and the protection of the weak.”

The November 1939 edition of The Call, the official organ of the English-speaking division of the Workman’s Circle, acknowledged that European Jewry would be greatly affected. “In the coming days, the areas of Jewish wretchedness will increase, the intensity of Jewish agony will reach a breaking point.”

https://www.jewishlinknj.com/features/25865-what-did-they-know-when-did-they-know-how-did-they-interpret-the-information

Part I

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum recently announced it is opening a new special exhibition, “Americans and the Holocaust,” in the spring of 2018 as a part of a museum-wide initiative exploring American responses to the Holocaust.

Among the questions the exhibit will attempt to answer are: What did American Jews know about the Holocaust, when did they know about the destruction and how did they respond?

If we are to learn from our past, we need to understand what American Jews knew about the plight of the Jews in Europe. When did the first reports appear in the Anglo-Jewish, American, Yiddish, and press about attacks against Jews? Did the accounts appear sporadically or often? How were they interpreted by American Jews? At any point did American Jews realize that the Nazi onslaught might be different than past massacres and persecution?

We begin our inquiry on September 1, 1939, when the war in Europe began. A wide range of national, regional and organizational papers and periodicals were reviewed. Another major source of information is derived from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletin (JTA), a bureau established in 1914 to gather and distribute news about Jews. The New York Times is included in the survey since it is the newspaper of record in the U.S. The Times generally relegated the news concerning Jews to the inside or back pages of the paper. But this did not mean Jews did not see these articles. When reading a newspaper, Jews generally tend to look for items about the Jewish community no matter where they are positioned in the paper.

The Torah begins with descriptions of a world without form, the evolution of distinctions and differentiation – light/darkness, day/night, sea/dry land, and the origins of life – and with rules: what is permitted and what is forbidden.

The purpose of this narrative is not to teach us how, but why. It is meant not as a precise record of the world’s creation and the way it works, but as a guiding metaphor: Life has meaning because it has order, structure and rules that define purpose and link us to transcendence.

From a Torah perspective, the origins of the universe and life are not scientific questions, but moral obligations. It’s irrelevant whether the world is 5,776 years old or 50 million years old. What matters is how one lives – and the structure that the Torah provides is what shows us how to do so in a way that connects us to God.

This approach is apparent in God’s commandment to Noah to build an ark – not only what to build, but how to build it, the type of wood, dimensions, etc. Yet the size of the ark is not important; it is significant only as a God-inspired vessel – a metaphor for our own bodies and our lives. Noah was building a ship not only to save himself and his family, but to create a new civilization, one that would eventually produce Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, followed by the Jewish people, and influence mankind.

This idea of a God-ordered universe is intended to counter pagan ideas that nature and natural forces occur randomly. In the biblical pagan societies, there were no moral or ethical boundaries. In contrast, Judaism is based on the belief that everything and everyone has a divine purpose in the world. Regardless of difficulties and tragedies, one is obligated to fulfill that purpose.

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/269596/scott-shay-leap-of-faith

Scott Shay is a banker, not a rabbi or professor. He’s a founder and chairman of Signature Bank, a New York lender catering to local middle-market businesses and one of the financial success stories of the past decade. He dedicates a large part of his time to Jewish community work—the Chai Mitzvah movement, the local Jewish Federation, his Modern Orthodox synagogue Kehilath Jeshurun—and in 2006 published a well-received book about Jewish outreach and engagement through community initiatives.

A few years ago, Shay noticed that Jewish kids with a high degree of Jewish literacy, including day-school students, drew a blank on the central premise of Judaism, or any religion: that there is a God who wants something from us. He noted the cultural impact of the New Atheists, a small but influential group of writers—including evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and neuroscientist Sam Harris—who claim that gene science and brain biology demolish the notion of a personal God. He couldn’t find a book that took on the New Atheists, so he wrote it himself: In Good Faith: Questioning Atheism and Religion.

Shay wants his readers to think hard about the implications of belief or non-belief, and to take responsibility for the implications of what they believe. He writes in his new book: “The existence of God is a matter of belief in the plausible rationality of the biblical description of God and our contemporary personal experiences of God. So yes, today one must believe in God; no one can be certain that He does or does not exist.”

The New Atheists want to dethrone God—whom Dawkins mocked as “a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak”—but they worship something else in the place of God, Shay told me. “I think it’s a matter of belief either to acknowledge that there is a God, or to claim that there is no God,” he said. “I think both require a leap of faith.” For Dawkins and his atheist fellows, that means worshiping man, says Shay—but that’s also an expression of faith, with dire consequences.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/30/the-angry-

Sarah Jeong’s nasty tweets raise a personal question, not a political one: why is she so bitter when she has enjoyed so much success?

Her animus against white people sounds like a teen version of 1960s-era race radicals who demonized the white race as, in Susan Sontag’s infamous words, “the cancer of human history.” The ascent of this nonwhite, nonmale who doesn’t seem particularly astute or witty should produce the happy recognition that the long dominance of one identity group, white men, has diminished. Liberalism is winning—rejoice!

No gratitude from her, though, or from others, either. The Atlantic’s former correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates has made millions from his writings and speeches (his MacArthur award alone brought in $625,000), but that hasn’t blunted his anti-American rancor.

Women have earned more bachelor’s degrees and doctorates than men for many years, but feminists haven’t slowed their complaints about an enduring patriarchy.

When multiculturalists entered higher education in the 1970s and ’80s, they insisted that Western civilization move over and make room for “other” cultures and traditions. Now that Western Civ requirements have disappeared and “diversity” requirements have proliferated, though, we see more accusations of an alignment of Western civilization with white supremacy than we did 20 years ago (as with the response to President Trump’s magnificent speech in Warsaw).

Humanities professors, nearly all of them liberal or leftist, lead blessed lives in the bucolic enclaves of rich, selective schools, but I don’t know of any labor group that grumbles so much about the national condition (especially as measured by the election of President Trump).

A Comprehensive Mindset
Now, when people’s personal circumstances run squarely against their political judgments, something funny is going on in their heads. Way back in the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche saw it clearly and gave it a name: ressentiment.